Controlling ParticleSystem time manually

Scripting
1

Is there any way to control the time of a ParticleSystem through code? Just exactly like you can do it in the editor scene view. I for the life of me can’t find a way to mimic that behavior at runtime. Unfortunately I have a suspicion that unity hasn’t exposed enough of it’s API :(. This is the best I have come up with:

using UnityEngine;

[RequireComponent(typeof(ParticleSystem))]
public class ParticleSystemSampler : MonoBehaviour
{
   public float playbackTime = 0f;

   void Awake()
   {
      particleSystem.randomSeed = 1;
   }
   void Update()
   {
      particleSystem.Simulate(playbackTime, true, true);
   }
}

It works great up until playbackTime surpasses the ParticleSystem’s startLifetime variable. At that point playbackTime becomes ineffective.

1893064--121888--Screen Shot 2014-12-19 at 9.11.11 PM.png

2

@Kaspar-Daugaard